The market for communications and computational devices is constantly improving. As a result, there is an increasing demand for smaller circuit packages that achieve higher performance. For example, communications and video devices, such as amplifier devices, are often designed to operate at increasingly higher bandwidths. To achieve operation at higher bandwidths, such communications devices often require circuitry that includes electronic components having precise values.
As an example, a typical design for an analog circuit often requires a number of passive components, such as resistors and capacitors. Resistors and capacitors can be formed from semiconductor material, such as in an ultra-deep sub-micron (UDSM) process, such that the resistors and capacitors can be included in an integrated circuit (IC). However, on-chip resistors, such as N-well resistors formed in a UDSM process, can have very large variations in resistance value (e.g., −30% to +48%) based on process and temperature variations. Such variations in resistance value may cause increased gain error over high bandwidth in a given communications and/or video application, and can also make such important requirements like the output impedance matching difficult for such devices. In addition, on-chip resistors can provide poor linearity, particularly at high frequencies of operation of the communications and/or video devices. Resistance value variations and linearity can be better controlled through using external circuit devices, such as external precision resistors, and/or by implementing trimming or tuning methods. However, such solutions are often prohibitively expensive and can greatly increase the physical size of the circuit in which they are used.